HISTORY’s Moment in Media: Creative Artists Agency Comes to the Scene
On January 7, 1975, Sam Weisbord, a top executive at the venerable William Morris Agency, called his colleague Rowland Perkins, who was early in his career, and suggested they take a walk around their Los Angeles neighborhood. For Weisbord, this was a regular way to conduct meetings. After a few blocks, he asked Perkins: “It’s come to my attention that you and Haber and Meyer and Ovitz are planning on leaving, is that true?” Perkins confirmed that, at least for him, it was. “You have committed treason,” Perkins says Weisbord told him, and almost immediately he was fired.
Later that January -- 50 years ago this month -- Perkins and his former William Morris colleagues Michael Rosenfeld, Ronald Meyer, William Haber, and most notably Michael Ovitz founded Creative Artists Agency, which would go on to transform the role talent agencies could play in the entertainment business and dominate Hollywood over the next few decades.
William Morris, from which the CAA founders defected, had been around since 1898. It represented the old guard, and the old way of doing things. Ovitz, the leader of the five CAA partners, was ferociously ambitious, and he was also a student of Japanese management techniques, considered revolutionary at that time. He was determined to bring to the traditionally siloed and secretive world of Hollywood talent agencies the concept of a horizontal and collaborative workplace.
The upstart idea was for the agents to suppress individual ego, and work together as a group to benefit each individual agent’s clients. “Every client is represented by the whole agency,” they say. For decades, a studio would approach an actor or director, via their agent, with a potential script, and the talent would either sign on or pass. At CAA, the response to a studio was never a “no” -- instead, if the pitched actor wasn’t interested, they’d find out who else in the agency’s stable was and come back to the studio with a counteroffer.
This developed into the practice for which CAA became best known: “packaging,” the art of pulling together a project prepackaged with the agency’s talent before it ever went out to a studio -- which both helped the project to get made and ensured CAA was well compensated for its efforts. The art of packaging wasn’t new -- a previous generation’s dominant talent agency, MCA, was such a prolific packager that when it sought to acquire Universal Pictures in 1962, the U.S. Department of Justice required, on antitrust grounds, that it shut down its agency operations.
CAA didn’t produce; it only packaged. In its early days, with its founding partners’ backgrounds in William Morris’s television business, it became a powerhouse in TV, packaging hit shows including ALF, Golden Girls, and Empty Nest. Rather than building its own book departments, it developed productive relationships with a range of New York literary agents, most notably the titan Mort Janklow, which gave it access to a range of literary properties -- and helped it build a thriving business packaging miniseries.
It didn’t hurt the business that this success enabled CAA to charge studios less for its packaging services than its competitors did, 6 percent versus the standard 10 percent. And it didn’t hurt in attracting clients that the practice of packaging enabled CAA to put together a high-wattage team that would make it much harder for a studio to say no to a client’s passion project. It’s how CAA eventually got a Dustin Hoffman project made, turning it into the hit Rain Man. It’s how they helped Amy Heckerling make Clueless. CAA packaging brought us Tootsie and Ghostbusters and Jurassic Park. And it made a generation of top-level talent supremely loyal to the agency that was able to help them reach their goals.
To develop bigger packages, and help its clients achieve what they dream of, CAA expanded into new areas. Movies have soundtracks -- and so it expanded into music. Celebrity athletes want to appear in media -- and so it expanded into sports. In 1989, CAA’s Ovitz helped retired L.A. Lakers legend Magic Johnson land an unprecedented deal with Pepsi, one that made him the soft drink’s celebrity spokesman -- and netted him a lucrative stake in a Pepsi bottling plant. And a few years later, CAA expanded into advertising, taking on creative duties for Coca-Cola.
In 1995, Ovitz left CAA to become president of Walt Disney. Only a few months earlier, his key partner Ron Meyer had left for Universal. The legendary era of CAA power ended. But even as the agency’s leadership changed, all these years later it remains one of the powerful “Big Three”Hollywood agencies -- ironically enough, alongside WME, formed by the merger of William Morris, from which the CAA founders defected, and Endeavor, to which a clutch of CAA agents defected after Ovitz and Meyer left.
The art of packaging, however, has proved less resilient. In 2022, after 7,000 Hollywood writers fired their agents as part of a negotiating campaign, the agencies agreed that they’d stop collecting packaging fees.
Posted at MediaVillage through the Thought Leadership self-publishing platform.
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